Interior Decorating Ideas

EDWIN LUTYENS – AN ENGLISH ARCHITECT

Edwin Lutyens Architecture

The dominant English architect and designer for the first four decades of the twentieth century was Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944). Lutyens (pronounced “ Lutchens” ) was responsible for many large building projects.

He worked at first in an Arts and Crafts manner, using vernacular elements such as casement windows with small leaded panes and steeply pitched tile roofs, all finely crafted. Gradually he moved towards greater classicism and formal symmetry.

It is in his residential work that Lutyen’s skill and variety are most easily seen. His houses were a highly personal mixture of romanticism and classicism and a highly electric mixture of stylistic revivals.

His Folly Farm, in Berkshire, 1908, employed and English Baroque style, reminiscent of design from two centuries earlier, but in its interiors (Fig 21-3 )he used more classical elements, dramatically presented and strikingly colored.

Interestingly, the largest of all his projects was the government complex at New Delhi, India (1912-30) , which was an example of Beaux Arts planning but one in which Lutyens introduced some motifs of the traditional architecture of India. Such and the umbrella shaped cupolas called (chattris). The Viceroys House, which terminated the main axis of the complex, was larger than Versailles.

Pioneers

Contemporary with de Wolfe and Lutyens were three key features who had their roots in the century before but developed strong design characters of their own. Without their ground work, modernism might never have established itself so securely.